Tagged Questions

Tools include any physical devices or artifacts used in the writing process, as well as software tools (which should additionally include the Software tag). For questions regarding process, methodology, or organization, use the Technique tag.

I've just stumbled upon the Snowflake Pro software and have been very happy with how it has improved the quality and completeness of my manuscript. At the end of the process, the software uses all the ...

I'm looking for software that will permit me to write articles of various sizes, with a title and tags for each article. The program should store the content, and then allow me to browse (whether from ...

I'm familiar with word clouds (or tag clouds) as used on blogs or on sites like Delicious. It seems to me that a tool similar to that could be of use to writers like me, who don't have an editor, when ...

My language skills in general are very low, i have problems to form sentences, each sentence is a frustrating fight not won at the end of the point. Nethertheless, i would like to prove myself being ...

In many companies I've seen it that more than 1 person are writing at the same documentation (be it user manual or technical documentation) for a computer application.
What I have seen in usage was ...

My team uses MadCap Flare for documentation and we have an editor on the team. When a writer is ready, we assemble a review package in Flare and send it to the editor, and she makes changes and sends ...

I'm not a native English speaker and I have a hard time finding good words sometimes. Sometimes I feel like there should be an idiom for the thing I want to say, but cannot remember it correctly. For ...

Usually I just use the synonym suggestions at dictionary.com (or its tie-in site thesaurus.com) but it's pretty lame. Most of the synonyms it suggests are basic and well-known words I already know. In ...

I am working on some unpublished texts that cover a period of over ten years and many thousands of pages. These texts need to be distilled into key ideas that ideally would be available as a kind of ...

As I had asked in another part of Stackexchange (didn't know about this part until some comments there) I'm writing manuals (mostly for computer games, but in addition to this also for tabletop games, ...

I am formatting a document as a novel using OpenOffice Writer.
I have a paragraph style for the main body, and another style derived from it that is the first paragraph in a chapter. I've set up this ...

Can anyone point me to an RDF vocabulary used for story-telling? A Resource Description Framework is a technique for structuring data in a way that computers can easily process it and connect simple ...

I'm having trouble with keeping "units" on the same line, or together. For example, g C m-2 (grams of carbon per square meter) often gets broken between the "-" and "2". I realize it's possible to use ...

Imagine I want to write a fictional book, whose purpose is to show what will happen to the world, if something changes.
For example: How will we live, if...
crowdsourced funding (microfinance in M. ...

I'm doing a proofing check of a book prior to submitting to publication and want to make sure it's as neat as possible before doing so.
Recently, I've had to merge two versions of the document - from ...

I'm working on a fantasy series and have been keeping a Word document full of backstory, character/location information, and other world-building elements. At 160+ pages, it's reached the point where ...

I would like some alternatives to using a mindmap to organize my thoughts while writing. Mindmapping is good, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't preserve the sequence/order, therefore it makes things ...

This site's writing reports claim that excessive use of prepositions makes writing unclear. For example:
"The principle of keeping nouns and verbs as close to each other as possible for the benefit ...

My company currently maintains our technical documentation (User's Guide) in Google Docs. With each release I produce a PDF that we host on our website.
Here are the features of Google Docs that work ...

It has been a long time since I last tried to write a play, and I hated it, not the play (which became a short story), but writing one. The word processors made working with script layout a pain, and ...

In technical documentation, sometimes the tool's automatic hyphenation makes a bad break in the middle of a term, like the name of an environment variable or function. In these cases I would rather ...

I've written a piece of fiction with GitHub, which means I have access to many version of my writing. I'm curious to see how my writing adapted over time. Did I keep eliminating then re-adding a word? ...

...and scales well?
I'm in the process of writing a text game / "Make your own adventure" novel, with a fairly convoluted, non-linear plot. Getting that plot under control has proven to be a rather ...

I was wondering if anyone could lend some advice as to the pros and cons between using Mashery versus Apigee for documenting an API? I have do some evaluating and have about 2 weeks to come up with a ...

Over on another site we're talking about taking some of our content (on a particular theme) and re-packaging it as a printable PDF. (The primary use case is paper.) This wouldn't be a straight dump ...

I'm a writer—no programming, only prose in text files, mostly in Emacs org-mode, some in markdown-mode.
I want to implement a version control system for my writing projects.
I work with two types of ...

I'm working on a writing project with a friend, and we're looking for some kind of (preferably cloud-based) project management and version control software so each of us can see how far the other has ...

I have been using iBook author, for a time and the simple Mac TextEdit along with openOffice TextDocument. And I recently downloaded Evernote in expectation of more (but that's something else and not ...

I'm using a plain text editor (Vim) to write a fiction piece (chapter book), and I'm wondering what markup languages others use for such a task? I'm looking for something exceedingly simple, it does ...

I'm writing a paper, supposedly using APA citation style, and I've encountered the following conflict.
On the one hand, the title of the work I cite is cited in all small letters, and only the first ...

I like the writing tool Scrivener because of the organisation tools like the corkboard and the no-frills full screen mode. I'm starting out my thesis using the Windows trial and intending to buy if I ...

I need to revise a screenplay in Final Draft, and I'm finding that the revision features in the program are poor. Are there any ways to introduce revision features in to Final Draft, similar to Track ...

I am a programmer by profession and am looking for good text processors to help me with my blog writing. Word(MS/OpenOffice) has felt too clunky, because of the interruptions(corrections,formatting ...